human hubris

It’s true that remaking other species according to our own wants and needsdoesn’t necessarily put animal welfare first. Selective breeding hasn’t alwaysturned out well for animals—we’ve saddled dog breeds with all sorts ofhereditary diseases and created turkeys with such gigantic breasts that theycan barely walk. And of course, biotechnology gives us new ways to dodamage. The Fudan University scientists have created mouse embryos withdefects so severe that they die in the womb. Some of their mutant mice areprone to tumors, or kidney disease, or neurological problems. One strain,unable to absorb nutrients from food, essentially starves to death.In fact, a whole industry has sprung up to sell diseased lab animals toscientists, with numerous biotech companies hawking their unique creations.In October 2011, many of these companies converged on St. Pete Beach,Florida, for an international meeting of scientists who work with geneticallymodified organisms. Representatives from various biotech firms held courtfrom booths ringing a hotel ballroom, advertising animals that had beenengineered to suffer from all sorts of medical afflictions. One company wasselling pigs with cystic fibrosis and cancer; a brochure from another outlinedeleven available strains of rodents, from the NSE-p25 mouse, designed todisplay Alzheimer’s-like symptoms, to the 11BHSD2 mouse, which has atendency to drop dead of heart failure. (And just in case nothing there caughtyour fancy, one company’s poster promised, “You design the experiment,we’ll design the mice.”) These companies aren’t making sickly animalspurely to be cruel, of course; studying these creatures yields valuable insightinto human disease.